Thanks very much for the follow-up of/and encouragement. It is most appreciated - I felt slightly squashed, albeit for totally understandable reasons, and I could not fault the squashing

I can't help but agree that given the proximity of the Maemo project, the letters you mention would prove quite the mosquito for many groups. I definitely don't want to cause anything like that coming from this direction.

So now I just need to figure out how on earth to give my idea the reach it would be nice for this to have (it's Palm-oriented, FWIW, as opposed to Maemo-oriented, so there's at least that).

Regarding emulation, it definitely has its annoyances (eg, learning that GCC makes my laptop get to 72°C until I remembered that scratchbox is actually, um, like, a **cross-compilation environment** - sadly such goings around in circles are not especially uncommon for me.......), but emulation is also great in the sense that it makes it a lot easier to take software to bits and see how it works without needing to worry about breaking the environment it's in. It also makes it possible to let others run software originally designed to run on a specific device, without needing the device, which aids development efforts too.

That being said, I must admit that I don't have any N series stuff.

The N770 found its way across my screen at some point and I immediately knew what my new favorite gadget was (IIRC I actually dug around and learned about it almost as soon as I discovered it, which wasn't usual for me circa 2007). Then the N800 and N810 followed, and my jaw all but hit the floor. Yup yup and yup, I can has all of them?

Sadly I never got a chance to play with one, as the Super Ultra Extremely Smart And Expressly Customer-Focused telcos here in Australia decided they weren't interesting. It would only have been possible for me to get such a device on a plan at that point. (The closest I came was tinkering with an N8, which was Symbian. Eh, EPOC was nice (I found an Ericsson MC218 (Psion Series 5 clone/rebrand) in an op-shop one day, that was awesome), but Symbian isn't Maemo :P)

I've had a bit of an odd situation with gadgets and tech in general for a very long time, mostly due to a bunch of health conditions which prevent me from working and also involve notable expense (quite the catch-22). I'm getting to the point where I really really do need to get my first smartphone (last used a dumbphone circa 2006, until I couldn't justify keeping it connected) - the reason I've managed to hold off for as long as I have is that I'm hyper-conscious of all the bloatware, inflexibility and ease of monitoring that ships by default in Android, and I 100% know I'll be driven *beyond* distraction if I can't rebuild the system from source... but my current hardware 100% cannot handle compiling large projects (building just LLVM near killed it about a year ago, and I never tried anything else after that xD).

Hm, this went a bit distracted. Uh, anyway... I continue making small bits of progress with my idea, and have now added figuring out how to tell people about the idea to my problem-solving queue.